Likewise, BeOS (which I'll get to in a minute) has its own bug database (http://www.be.com/developers/bugs/index.html) with its own classification system, including such categories as "Not a Bug," "Acknowledged Feature," and "Will Not Fix." Some of the "bugs" here are nothing more than Be hackers blowing off steam, and are classified as "Input Acknowledged." For example, I found one that was posted on December 30th, 1998. It's in the middle of a long list of bugs, wedged between one entitled "Mouse working in very strange fashion" and another called "Change of BView frame does not affect, if BView not attached to a BWindow."
This one is entitled
R4: BeOS missing megalomaniacal figurehead to harness and focus developer rage
and it goes like this:
----------------------------
Be Status: Input Acknowledged BeOS Version: R3.2 Component: unknown
Full Description:
The BeOS needs a megalomaniacal egomaniac sitting on its throne to give it a human character which everyone loves to hate. Without this, the BeOS will languish in the impersonifiable realm of OSs that people can never quite get a handle on. You can judge the success of an OS not by the quality of its features, but by how infamous and disliked the leaders behind them are.
I believe this is a side-effect of developer comraderie under miserable conditions. After all, misery loves company. I believe that making the BeOS less conceptually accessible and far less reliable will require developers to band together, thus developing the kind of community where strangers talk to one- another, kind of like at a grocery store before a huge snowstorm.
Following this same program, it will likely be necessary to move the BeOS headquarters to a far-less-comfortable climate. General environmental discomfort will breed this attitude within and there truly is no greater recipe for success. I would suggest Seattle, but I think it's already taken. You might try Washington, DC, but definitely not somewhere like San Diego or Tucson.
----------------------------
Unfortunately, the Be bug reporting system strips off the names of the people who report the bugs (to protect them from retribution!?) and so I don't know who wrote this.
So it would appear that I'm in the middle of crowing about the technical and moral superiority of Debian Linux. But as almost always happens in the OS world, it's more complicated than that. I have Windows NT running on another machine, and the other day (Jan. 1999), when I had a problem with it, I decided to have another go at Microsoft Support. This time the search engine actually worked (though in order to reach it I had to identify myself as "advanced"). And instead of coughing up some useless FAQ, it located about two hundred documents (I was using very vague search criteria) that were obviously bug reports--though they were called something else. Microsoft, in other words, has got a system up and running that is functionally equivalent to Debian's bug database. It looks and feels different, of course, but it contains technical nitty-gritty and makes no bones about the existence of errors.
As I've explained, selling OSes for money is a basically untenable position, and the only way Apple and Microsoft can get away with it is by pursuing technological advancements as aggressively as they can, and by getting people to believe in, and to pay for, a particular image: in the case of Apple, that of the creative free thinker, and in the case of Microsoft, that of the respectable techno-bourgeois. Just like Disney, they're making money from selling an interface, a magic mirror. It has to be polished and seamless or else the whole illusion is ruined and the business plan vanishes like a mirage.
Accordingly, it was the case until recently that the people who wrote manuals and created customer support websites for commercial OSes seemed to have been barred, by their employers' legal or PR departments, from admitting, even obliquely, that the software might contain bugs or that the interface might be suffering from the blinking twelve problem. They couldn't address users' actual difficulties. The manuals and websites were therefore useless, and caused even technically self-assured users to wonder whether they were going subtly insane.
When Apple engages in this sort of corporate behavior, one wants to believe that they are really trying their best. We all want to give Apple the benefit of the doubt, because mean old Bill Gates kicked the crap out of them, and because they have good PR. But when Microsoft does it, one almost cannot help becoming a paranoid conspiracist. Obviously they are hiding something from us! And yet they are so powerful! They are trying to drive us crazy!
This approach to dealing with one's customers was straight out of the Central European totalitarianism of the mid-Twentieth Century. The adjectives "Kafkaesque" and "Orwellian" come to mind. It couldn't last, any more than the Berlin Wall could, and so now Microsoft has a publicly available bug database. It's called something else, and it takes a while to find it, but it's there.
They have, in other words, adapted to the two-tiered Eloi/Morlock structure of technological society. If you're an Eloi you install Windows, follow the instructions, hope for the best, and dumbly suffer when it breaks. If you're a Morlock you go to the website, tell it that you are "advanced," find the bug database, and get the truth straight from some anonymous Microsoft engineer.
But once Microsoft has taken this step, it raises the question, once again, of whether there is any point to being in the OS business at all. Customers might be willing to pay $95 to report a problem to Microsoft if, in return, they get some advice that no other user is getting. This has the useful side effect of keeping the users alienated from one another, which helps maintain the illusion that bugs are rare aberrations. But once the results of those bug reports become openly available on the Microsoft website, everything changes. No one is going to cough up $95 to report a problem when chances are good that some other sucker will do it first, and that instructions on how to fix the bug will then show up, for free, on a public website. And as the size of the bug database grows, it eventually becomes an open admission, on Microsoft's part, that their OSes have just as many bugs as their competitors'. There is no shame in that; as I mentioned, Debian's bug database has logged 32,000 reports so far. But it puts Microsoft on an equal footing with the others and makes it a lot harder for their customers--who want to believe--to believe.
MEMENTO MORI
Once the Linux machine has finished spitting out its jargonic opening telegram, it prompts me to log in with a user name and a password. At this point the machine is still running the command line interface, with white letters on a black screen. There are no windows, menus, or buttons. It does not respond to the mouse; it doesn't even know that the mouse is there. It is still possible to run a lot of software at this point. Emacs, for example, exists in both a CLI and a GUI version (actually there are two GUI versions, reflecting some sort of doctrinal schism between Richard Stallman and some hackers who got fed up with him). The same is true of many other Unix programs. Many don't have a GUI at all, and many that do are capable of running from the command line.
Of course, since my computer only has one monitor screen, I can only see one command line, and so you might think that I could only interact with one program at a time. But if I hold down the Alt key and then hit the F2 function button at the top of my keyboard, I am presented with a fresh, blank, black screen with a login prompt at the top of it. I can log in here and start some other program, then hit Alt-F1 and go back to the first screen, which is still doing whatever it was when I left it. Or I can do Alt-F3 and log in to a third screen, or a fourth, or a fifth. On one of these screens I might be logged in as myself, on another as root (the system administrator), on yet another I might be logged on to some other computer over the Internet.